Unless you have been living in a cave for about 10 years, you know that the next big thing in GIMP is called GEGL – that library has been in development for several years and aims to be the new engine that will launch GIMP to the stratosphere of image editing (more or less…)Read the rest of this entry »

I know this has been a very long time (I barely remembered my wordpress password) but here we go: a new article. Don’t expect much at that point though – if you were still expecting anything, that is.

But here is the thing: Pentaxforums has recently run a give away along the lines of “write a technical blogpost related to photography – we’ll pick the best one(s) and offer goodies up to $1000 thanks to sponsoring by B&H”.

if you want to help my “cause” read the article (the more hits, the higher my chances) or even better (if you are a subscriber to Pentaxforums – and any true Pentaxian should be) vote for me. Don’t tell me you didn’t se that one coming😛

this was also an opportunity to remember that blogging is time consuming, but also a lot of fun. So here is the idea: help me get a higher rank in PentaxForums give away and I’ll resume blogging🙂 The first article will be about GIMP being invaded by goats…

PS: no, this is not bribing: Adam (PF administrator) encouraged us to “share this voting thread with your friends, together with a link to your article”. I am just obeying :)

Have you ever had a couple (or more) memory cards full of images that you quickly want to download to your hard drive while making an extra backup copy and rename all files according to a certain pattern? And all of this as quickly as possible because you are here to take pictures, not to process your digital files? Damon Lynch has created Rapid Photo Downloader, a tool that does just that… and a bit more.

We are making pretty good progress towards GIMP 2.8 which has turned into an “everything but GEGL” release. I think it would make sense to also go for a single-window mode in 2.8 and not 2.10 as originally planned.

[…]

I intend to start working on this asap, and peter will work on a UI spec as soon as he gets time. If you have objections, please speak up.

/ Martin

Obviously, quite a few people spoke up (read the thread).

This also prompted Peter Sikking (GIMP’s UI designer) to blog about the issue: why this is desirable, what are the advantages and problems, etc. Peter also introduces the “image parade” to see the currently open and recently used images. Very interesting stuff (ie: read the blog post).

While it is always good to see progress in open source software, my personal taste would have been to get 16 bits support so that GIMP gets actually *usable* for photographic work. Still, kudos to the GIMP’s team for their work and best of luck with GIMP 2.8.

(But hey, based on how constant I am at updating this blog, who am I to lecture others??)

Converting digital images to B&W is a bit like the Swiss fondue recipe: everyone has a different version and each person is convinced to have the best. I previously blogged about the subject with a “blind comparison” between different methods – with the comparison’s result.

Now during the recent Libre Graphics Meeting, there was a short talk (I don’t remember the speaker) about “What’s new in GIMP 2.6?” and one of the hotness is the very explicitly named c2g feature, conveniently buried in the GEGL operations (sub-)menu.

And guess what? c2g is a black and white converter… maybe the ultimate one.